https://maxwell.npl.washington.edu/elog/project8/P8+Indiana/6
First spectra recorded from spectrometer and deuterium gas filament. Analyzed stability of gas discharge by waiting 5 minutes and observing any spectral distortions.
Checked if spectrometer wavelength calibration was accurate by assuming the mass shift is atomic spectra wavelength between deuterium and hydrogen.
https://maxwell.npl.washington.edu/elog/project8/P8+Indiana/8
Balmer-Alpha is typically saturated at large integration times. Testing various integration times to best observe spectra. Applied optical filter to intensity of red light to reduce transmission of Balmer-Alpha.
Utilized a red laser to test spectral peak distortions and asymmetries originate from the light discharge source or spectrometer itself.
https://maxwell.npl.washington.edu/elog/project8/P8+Indiana/10
The spectrometer resolution for minimum integration time is 3.8 ms, however we observe non physical results
https://maxwell.npl.washington.edu/elog/project8/P8+Indiana/11
Our conclusion was that integration times below 10 ms are statistically uncertain and results in unstable and irreproducable measurements of intensity counts.
We conducted an ambient background test with no intense source (lights on in the room).
Scanned over various integration times to see its effect on the deuterium spectra when we normalize and compare. Our conclusion is to vary integration time, however we balance that by performing scans to average. Thus the product of integration time * scans to average, will be constant to balance our statistics.
Added Ratio plots to comparing two spectral peaks (beta/gamma) (gamma/Fulcher), and added Poisson statistics based from area integrated under the curve for a set number of bins (25) per peak
https://maxwell.npl.washington.edu/elog/project8/P8+Indiana/30
https://maxwell.npl.washington.edu/elog/project8/P8+Indiana/31
Checked to see if turning off electric dark and nonlinearity made a difference.
We took two sets of data from the spectrometer. This was to test the spectrometer buffer of storing initial runs to perform the dark/electric dark correction of our spectrometer made sense even when our integration time is large.
Explicitly measured background spectrum of spectrometer environment and performed a background substraction on our deuterium spectrum. OceanView software can do this explictly in relative irradiance mode.
https://maxwell.npl.washington.edu/elog/project8/P8+Indiana/49
First plasma test with uncalibrated spectrometer. Utilized OceanView to anaylze plasma in ECR source of intensity counts with dark subtraction.
https://maxwell.npl.washington.edu/elog/project8/P8+Indiana/54
Second plasma test with calibrated spectrometer. Utilized blackbody irradiance to calibrate spectrometer with a background reference signal to take relative counts measurement of plasma with varying RF power. Can compare to total intensity counts.